Join Marcus du Sautoy and Venki Ramakrishan for the 2026 Charles Simonyi Lecture, Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality.

Humans have obsessed about ageing and mortality ever since we became aware of it. In the last few decades, we have begun to understand the underlying biological causes of ageing that eventually lead to death.

In Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality, Venki Ramakrishan will discuss the fundamental facts and promising approaches to combat ageing, as well as the social and ethical consequences of extending life.

About Venki Ramakrishnan

Venki Ramakrishnan grew up in India and left at the age of 19 for the United States. After a long career there, he moved in 1999 to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He works on the structure and function of the ribosome, an enormous molecular complex that reads the genetic information on mRNA (itself copied from a stretch of DNA) to synthesise the proteins they specify. His work also showed how many antibiotics work by blocking bacterial ribosomes, which could help to design better antibiotics. For this work, he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. From 2015 to 2020, he was president of the Royal Society.

Ramakrishnan is also the author of a popular memoir, Gene Machine, a frank description of the race for the structure of the ribosome and the science and personalities involved, and Why We Die, about the biology of ageing and our current efforts to combat it.